Village rules and formal environmental regulations are of great significance for standardizing farmers’ cleaner production behavior, promoting green transformation of agriculture and realizing sustainable development of agriculture. Based on the survey data of 946 farmers in five provinces of China, taking seed coating technology, soil testing and formulated fertilization technology, subsoiling tillage technology, green technology for pest and disease control and straw returning technology as examples, this article empirically analyzes the impact of village rules and formal environmental regulations on farmers’ cleaner production behavior by using the multivariate probit model. When formal environmental regulations are relatively lacking or weak, village rules can be used as a useful supplement to formal environmental regulations to promote farmers’ participation in cleaner production. Based on this, this article argues that the important reason for formal environmental regulations falling into relative system failure is that village rules have not been paid enough attention in promoting farmers’ cleaner production behavior. In the future, we should not only continue to strengthen the role of formal environmental regulations in farmers’ cleaner production, but also cultivate the informal institution represented by the village rules, and build the regulatory system of mutual support between informal institution and formal institution.

The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of rural population aging on farmers’ cleaner production behavior through the intervening effects of three aspects (learning capacity, factor substitution and behavior imitation). The data used in this article were collected from a questionnaire survey of 916 farmers in the main grain producing provinces of the North China Plain. First, confirmatory factor analysis was carried out, and then data were analyzed through structural equation modeling using the bootstrap methodology in AMOS 24. The findings indicate that rural population aging inhibits farmers’ cleaner production behavior through learning capacity. In contrast, rural population aging promotes farmers’ cleaner production behavior through factor substitution and behavior imitation. From the perspective of both challenges and opportunities, this article investigates the impact mechanism and comprehensive effect of rural population aging on farmers’ cleaner production behavior, so as to explore new ways to promote cleaner agricultural production under the background of an accelerated aging the of rural labor force and provide reference for the formulation of relevant policies.

Controlling the social and environmental responsibility of extended supply chains has become one of the most challenging issues in modern management. This paper models retailers’ optimal sourcing strategies for fresh agricultural products (FAPs) in order to understand sourcing activities of retailers more systematically under two scenarios – the symmetric information scenario and the asymmetric information scenario. In this paper, we suppose that to maximize profit, retailers can choose from two types of suppliers – suppliers with freshness-keeping efforts are costly but adhere to strict social and environmental responsibility standards, while risky suppliers without freshness-keeping efforts are less expensive but may experience responsibility violations. Hence, different sourcing strategies of retailers are modeled and simulated by numerical image analysis. The results show that the retailers’ profit is concave because of the proportion of quality-sensitive consumers. Isolated consumer-oriented approaches may have a negative impact on the level of freshness in the supply chain. On the other hand, higher penalty levels and the exposure probability of food safety incidents will have a positive impact on the freshness level in the supply chain. However, simply relying on enhanced regulations will not be enough. Instead, a combined effort, enhancing regulations, monitoring the market, and raising consumer awareness will be needed to rationalize the market and to create a quality-sensitive market. Results offer regulators and various stakeholders new insights, helping them to understand how to encourage quality sourcing practices and maximize food quality and safety in the supply chain.